Habr essay proposes limiting digital representatives to actions authorized in advance

Habr essay proposes limiting digital representatives to actions authorized in advance

On October 16, Alexander Samoylenko published the essay “Immortality as a Service” on Habr. He distinguishes between a digital footprint, a portrait, a model, a representative with a limited mandate, and a digital subject: a system with recognized duties and responsibility for the consequences of its actions.

When someone dies, they leave behind letters, photographs, voice messages, decisions, and habits. A digital footprint preserves these fragments, a portrait assembles them into an account of the person, and a model identifies patterns in how they speak, assess situations, and make choices. In Samoylenko’s framework, a representative can act within a mandate defined in advance: explain the person’s position, handle agreed correspondence, manage part of their legacy, or carry out their recorded intentions.

Samoylenko describes the distinction as follows:

“An archive preserves a person’s answers. A digital personality tries to preserve their ability to answer.”

The mandate provides a basis for decisions in new circumstances by linking them to values the person recorded during their lifetime.

In the author’s scenario, a person has supported a school, a line of research, or a charitable foundation for many years. After their death, the representative compares a new case with their recorded values, explains its position, publishes its reasoning, and consults trustees if the case calls for revising the previous decision rule. The representative thus derives a new decision from the preserved values and discusses it with the trustees.

To support this process, the author proposes a personal digital will: a document recording consent to data use, the provenance of original and synthetic materials, the limits of the mandate, trusteeship arrangements, and a history of changes. An independent audit could check the data sources, model version, change log, and operators’ authority. These provisions make it possible to verify which data the system uses, who changed its rules, and who has the authority to shut it down.

Research by Cambridge scholars on griefbots, digital simulations of deceased people, focuses on consent from both the person whose data are used and the person interacting with the simulation. Samoylenko poses a different organizational question: who defines the system’s authority, how its history of changes is made visible, and who can challenge a decision made on someone’s behalf.

Within the author’s framework, an action taken on behalf of a deceased person can be checked against the mandate, data provenance, and history of changes, while a trustee has the right to challenge a decision or shut down the system.